The air at the center of the clearing seemed to rot. Shen Tian, crouched on the thick branch of an iron pine fifty meters away, felt the stench of burnt ozone and rancid meat striking his nostrils with brutal immediacy.
The chaos of battle and the corrupt energy of the Void Being masked his signature. Even a Void Refinement Realm expert would struggle to distinguish a hidden Level 7 amid so much spiritual contamination. For now, he was invisible.
In front of Lin Xiao’s envoy group, the very fabric of space began to buckle like parchment exposed to a flame. A mass of black liquid, immensely dense and swallowing every reflection of light, gushed from nothingness. It was as if someone had pierced a hole in reality and the abyss was bleeding through it.
The dark substance condensed rapidly, boiling and stretching upward until it formed a three-meter-tall humanoid monstrosity. A massive torso rose above the ground, sprouting half a dozen appendages similar to tentacles or whips made of pure liquid shadow.
Shen Tian reduced his breathing to an almost undetectable rhythm, camouflaging himself completely with the tree bark under his Cultivation Concealment Technique.
The System emitted a pulse of blue light.
"[Dimensional anomaly detected: Void Being (Threat level: High).]"
"[Recommendation: Avoid direct combat. The crystal core is the only vulnerable point.]"
"Your tool only gives basic information," Xue Huang murmured. "Its analysis of that thing stops at the surface. Bad sign. But at least it tells you what we already knew: keep your distance."
"Void Being," Xue Huang in his mental space and Lin Xiao’s envoy on the forest floor said in unison.
"It is a dimensional anomaly," the Blood Empress continued, and her refined tone was now charged with a lethal warning. "They are born at crossroads where the fabric of the world is unstable. Pain and blood mean nothing to them; they are not spiritual beasts. Those black whips corrode Qi and organic matter on contact. The only way to destroy them is to shatter the dark crystal heart that floats erratically within that liquid mass."
Below, Lin Xiao’s envoy demonstrated why he had been entrusted with a mission of such caliber. Far from succumbing to the panic that already paralyzed the Zhao Clan elders, the man in embroidered tunics unsheathed a long sword that immediately began to radiate a glacial mist.
"Deploy the three-point containment formation!" the envoy roared, his voice cutting through the dense air with military authority. "Blocking its strikes directly will get your weapons devoured by those whips! Trap its extremities and limit its range of movement! I will attack the core!"
BOOM!
The battle erupted with thunderous violence.
The Void Being launched its first attack. Two whips of darkness shot forward with the speed of lightning. One of the Zhao elders, reacting a fraction of a second late, tried to deflect the blow with his spiritual saber. At the instant the metal clashed against the liquid shadow, a sharp hiss filled the clearing.
HSSSSS!
The saber’s blade dissolved into rust and ashes mid-air. The elder screamed, rolling on the ground just in time to avoid the whip tearing his arm off at the root.
The mysterious hooded figure and the other Zhao elder began moving in circles, launching explosive talismans and bursts of condensed Qi.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The explosions illuminated the clearing with orange and yellow flashes, while the Void Being simply absorbed the impacts, its liquid body deforming and regenerating instantly.
The distractions worked. Lin Xiao’s envoy seized the opening, propelling himself into the air with monstrous agility. His sword traced an arc of bluish light, launching a crescent of freezing Qi that temporarily froze the upper half of the creature. Through the dark ice, a faint purple glow betrayed the position of the crystal heart in the anomaly’s chest.
Shen Tian observed the clash of energies, his gray eyes evaluating every movement from the shadows of his straw hat. The envoy was lethal and precise. This had become an unpredictable war zone, and he needed both sides to bleed each other dry.
His balance was still at zero. Every System function sat beyond his reach. He would have to rely on his own abilities.
Just as the envoy prepared for the final blow, a deafening sound flooded the forest. It was the noise of thousands of claws furiously scraping against stone and wood.
SCRAPE! SCRAPE! SCRAPE!
Dozens, hundreds of RGB lights blinked in the darkness of the undergrowth and the surrounding treetops. Red, green, blue; the hive had responded to the call.
SKREEEE!
A scaly tide of Thousand-Colored Lizards lunged into the clearing. Like a cascade of serrated teeth and intermittent bioluminescence, the reptiles flooded the battlefield, trapping the cultivators in a deadly sandwich between the swarm and the dimensional anomaly.
"We are outnumbered!" howled one of the Zhao Clan elders, kicking a lizard in the jaw before three others clamped onto his legs. His Qi defenses began to crack under the combined bite of the horde.
CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
The clearing descended into absolute chaos. The containment formation broke. The Void Being, freed from the envoy’s freezing pressure, began lashing its whips in all directions, shredding trees and pulverizing rocks.
CRASH! BOOM!
It was then that Lin Xiao’s envoy demonstrated the true nature of his character. Trapped between the swarm leaping toward him and the corrosive whips of the anomaly, the man kept advancing. With a purely sociopathic coldness, he let out a dry laugh, grabbed one of the live lizards by its thick neck, and used it as a meat shield.
SQUELCH!
When the Void Being’s black whip descended to split him in two, the envoy hurled the reptile directly into the trajectory of the blow. The lizard shrieked as the dark whip pierced it, dissolving its flesh and bones in an instant. The envoy used the fraction of a second of physical resistance to advance one more step toward the creature’s core, repeating the process again and again. He grabbed live lizards and threw them at the Void Being’s deadly extremities to force his way through.
The anomaly carried far more cunning than a mindless predator.
As the dissolved corpses of the Thousand-Colored Lizards fell into the Void Being’s liquid base, the black tar drank their biomass whole.
The black ground bubbled violently. From the dimensional tar that formed the creature’s feet, new forms began to sprout. They were exact replicas of the lizards, created entirely of dark mud, dripping corrosion. Each of these aberrations bore eyes of a brilliant, lifeless crimson where RGB flashes once shone.
GROWL... HSSSSS...
"Assimilated shadows," Xue Huang whispered in Shen Tian’s mind, fascinated by the grotesque scene. "That monster is using the hive’s biomass to create its own defensive army. Those cultivators are dead if they do not break the crystal in the next three minutes."
The shadow lizards launched themselves at the Zhao Clan elders and the hooded figure. A simple graze from these creatures’ claws left black burns on the cultivators’ skin, poisoning their Qi. Screams of agony replaced the din of combat.
AAARGH!
Above, on his branch, Shen Tian remained as motionless as a stone gargoyle. His breathing was shallow; the Immortal Dagger of the Blood Era rested in his sleeve, hidden but ready. Its rusted exterior concealed a power he could not yet awaken. But even so, the Blood Era’s edge could cut mortal flesh.
Shen Tian adjusted his posture on the branch. The Immortal Dagger weighed in his sleeve, cold and expectant. Below, the envoy raised his sword toward the night sky. A shockwave of frost exploded from his position. The air itself froze. Hundreds of bluish ice stalactites formed from nothing, suspended in the gorge’s gravity, pointing toward the ground.
CRACKLE... CRACKLE...
It was the moment.
But Shen Tian held his position. The perfect moment still eluded him.
An assassin attacks when the enemy believes he has won. And the envoy had not yet won. The Void Being still stood. The shadow lizards kept coming. The battle still demanded a victor.
"Are you going to intervene?" Xue Huang asked, her voice tinged with surprise.
"I am going to wait," Shen Tian responded, his gray eyes fixed on the envoy. "When he launches that attack, his defenses will drop. The Void Being will be frozen. And I... I will be there."
"And the map?" the Empress insisted. "If you kill the envoy, the map is free. But that leaves you exposed. With your Points at zero, no allies, and no escape route..."
"The map can wait," Shen Tian said, and his voice was an icy whisper. "What matters to me is the Void Being’s core. That crystal is pure energy. Energy I can use. Energy the System can convert into Suppression Points. And with those points..."
"...you can restore the dagger," Xue Huang completed, understanding. "And with the dagger restored, you can kill the envoy."
"Exactly."
FWOOSH! CRASH! SHATTER!
The envoy brought down the ice storm. The impact was annihilating. The shadow lizards were massacred. The Void Being’s whips were frozen. The anomaly roared, its liquid mass paralyzed, the crystal heart exposed and defenseless.
RRRAAAAGH!
But the massive attack had a price. The envoy fell to one knee, his meridians empty. His guard dropped for a microsecond.
That was the moment.
Shen Tian disappeared from the branch.
WHOOSH!